


Immortals

by therewasagirl



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: F/M, hades x persephone au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-02
Updated: 2017-02-02
Packaged: 2018-09-21 15:53:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9555968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/therewasagirl/pseuds/therewasagirl
Summary: To die for loveto die of loveto die in loveto die with loveto die over loveto die without loveto die to loveto die in the mineand be a “mine”in the arms of someone’schest wound, “Here I will die of the above.”- Fanny Howe, Gone: Poems





	1. Chapter 1

She unstrapped the laces of her sandals and abandoned them on the side of the green meadow. The morning sun had yet to break over the peaks of the of the tall buildings around her, but she had time.

Time was the only thing that she never seemed to run out of.

She turned her face to the east, closed her eyes and waited. Listened. The night’s last breaths clung to the air, the way this pale spring morning still clung to winter’s chill. The cold raised the tiny hairs on her arms, on the back of her neck, her legs. She welcomed it, let it sink in – enjoyed the shivers it brought forth. The morning birds broke the silence, their song becoming more stubborn as if they too were waiting for the sun.

She shared their joy, though many would be surprised to know it.

In every story ever told, she was the one who always took and never gave. Not anything anyone might want, anyway. The accursed one, the one whose powers living beings dreaded. Even when mortals had believed in her and her brothers and sisters, she had been feared, ever loved. Sacrifices and whispered prayers used to come to her ears, never celebrations in her name.

Not from the world above, anyway. The one below was different; it did not forget so easily.

She had left her mark in the collective mind of humanity as the dreary creature that dwelt in dark places, and though she could understand where the image came from, she also found it so inaccurate it was almost funny.

The truth had been forgotten long ago by the world above. Even by the deathless beings of her times that still remembered what she had once been, before becoming the ruler of the other side.

But that truth lived in her heart still, an ever-green thing that could not be forgotten or mistaken.

She had always _loved_ the sun and all living, growing things. She welcomed them into her domain to take care of them, in celebration of them. To give them peace, endless fields of it.

And retribution, where it was needed, for she was Justice too., as she was Vengeance. Because though she loved and perpetuated life, above all else, she was fair to the dead.

But those thoughts were too heavy for such a beautiful morning. She walked forward, sinking her feet into the dewed grass as the sun finally rose, its first rays breaking on the glass of the skyscrapers into a thousand reflections, washing her with warmth and light. She could feel the echo of her own force pulsing through the soft earth beneath the soles of her feet. Upwards through her legs, the strength of the earth and all that lay beneath it surged into her, like an embrace. It settled in the centre of her chest, awake, all-encompassing and old as creation.

She wiggled her toes, let them sink into the soft earth. It tickled a little and made her smile. She could smell the first of spring in the air, when the sun invited the budding flowers of the lemons and peach trees around her to open up again and soak in warmth.

She had been prepared to spend the whole day soaking in the sun, perhaps walking the mountains close to the city and rediscovering new grooves, awakening old memories.

But it was not meant to be.

She felt the pull of the call as one would feel a whisper at the back of their neck. It traveled down her spine, raising awareness.

She opened her palms and let the power that flowed through her from the earth, stretch outwards through her hands, opening a portal through the Aether into her apartment.

She stepped through the ring of fire into her loft and there _she_ was: dark and forbidding as she always looked, in the middle of the open-plan loft. Embraced by the golden light of the morning sun, Thanatos’ long black robes looked as ephemeral as smoke, a creation held together with a whisper and a thought; and she, an apparition. _The ghost of a great dark bird_ , she thought. Death’s favorite form.

But instead of the scheletical form she held in the world above, she was actually making an effort to be seen with her other, truer, face. And the look on that face was far from its usual composed peacefulness.

“Well this is a surprise. Not that you’re not always welcome, but a visit from you this time of the year is rare.” she said lightly as she walked towards her.

Sorrow so rarely touched the face of the Guide of the Dead, but when it did, her Queen knew her well enough to know what put it there.

She sighed. “Did it happen, then?”

Nyssa nodded stiffly. “Yes.”

Felicity sighed deeply and let herself fall heavily on her sofa. “I thought she’d stopped looking for him.”

Thanatos shook her head, the thick dark waves of her hair floating gently as she moved.

“They will always find each other. Even if she doesn’t look. Even though he always forgets. It’s physics.” Nyssa tipped her chin up a little. “It’s the Fates.”

Yes, it was.

Every some millennia or so however, the nymph got it in her head that she didn’t want to let her mortal’s soul go.

Well, that was not accurate. She fought it every time it happened. Fought Death every time as hard as she had that first time, when she’d cheated by breathing a sliver of her immortal soul into a mortal body halfway in the lands of the Underworld - starting what would become a wheel punishment.

But sometimes… sometimes she came up with an actual war to wage, and not just a battle.

This was one of those times, it seemed.

“Did she fight you for him?”

Nyssa’s lips curved upwards. A sad smile. “Harder than ever. But this time it’s different.”

She had already figured. If she settled her mind and reached into the confines of her realm, she could feel him. That one mortal soul that she sometimes escorted to the banks of the Lethe herself. It was hovering now on the shores of the Styx, not in, not out. Waiting.

He couldn’t move.

She opened her eyes and pinned Nyssa with them, a frown pulling her brows together.

“She wants to bargain.” Nyssa explained.

The Queen’s frown deepened. “There is no bargaining with the Fates. What had to be, came to pass and it could not have happened any other way.”

When Nyssa did not reply, Felicity got up and reached forward with both her hands and her mind, encompassed Nyssa’s being, and went back to where Death had last before she came here.

A shivering city, stinking of fear, a crumbled building. A woman who was not a woman at all, crying over the mangled body of her lover, who gave his frail mortal life for hers, without knowing no rock of falling iron could ever kill her. Another man on his knees, just to the other side of the dying mortal, defeated.

A battle. The nymph’s fury smashing against Thanatos’ inexorable will.

And finally an understanding, an exhaustion that overwhelmed pain and grief.

The nymph had made an offer… and offer that was not Nyssa’s to refuse. Nyssa escorted souls. That was her duty. The gates of the underworld were not hers to open or bar to anyone. She was only guardian to the gates of Death.

The Queen let go of Nyssa’s hands with an angry hiss, stepped back. With a wave of her hand she called both the Nymph and the Archer to her as she tried to pace her frustration away in front of the floor-length windows of the loft.

The sun was no comfort.

They appeared behind her in a soft whoosh of air. More than the sound of their coming or their physically being there, the smell of destruction clinging to them made them real. The Queen breathed in the smoke and the blood, the iron bitterness that tinted the air, coming off their skin.

Ares had left his stench on them both.

She turned, arms crossed over her chest, her face expressionless. She disregarded the nymph’s companion, her eyes seeking the other woman’s instead.

Strange, how little she had changed since the first time she stumbled into the underworld, begging for her pain to end.

“Nereid.” The Queen greeted flatly.

The nymph bowed her head, her right hand, knuckles bloody, coming up to touch her heart, in the old greeting of the watery depths she had been born of.

“My Queen.”

Felicity considered her. Her dark hair, pale eyes. Her bruised face, the blood on her. One would think she stood before a goddess of war.

“You go by Daphne’s name these days, don’t you?”

“Yes.” The nymph nodded, arms falling to her sides. “Laurel.”

“I have chosen Felicity, for now.”

The nymph’s eyes were exhausted but she found it in herself to scoff. “You always had a warped sense of humor.”

The Queen smirked a little bit. “I think it suits me.”

But Laurel was not fooled, only amused. “You think it’s funny how little they understand of you.”

The Queen simply shrugged.

She couldn’t deny that backhanded irony at the Olympian’s expense had always been always appealing to her. Mortal’s too, if she were honest, though it was not their fault that they feared the unknown and found her to be the personification of it. Fear of the death was in their nature.

No, the joke was mostly on her family and their family, and their raucous belief that she was the death of every party.

Nyssa found this especially hilarious, as she did the Queen’s penchant for saying the exact wrong thing, always and delighting in the shock it caused.

“Laurel, what are we _doing_ here?” the archer finally asked, voice rough with grief and barely-contained anger.

The Queen’s eyes flickered to him for the first time since he walked in.

As she considered him carefully, she felt that there was something distinctively familiar about him, but between the hood and the paint and the dark shroud around his mind, she couldn’t easily place what. It was a thought that kept dancing just an inch behind her head, unwilling to be caught.

He was not her concern, anyway.

“What I told you we would be doing.” Laurel turned her eyes back to Felicity. “Meeting the ruler of Hades.”

“What?” his eyes turned to Felicity again, words trailing off as he looked again and this time, _saw_.

His eyes – they were very blue, mirror of the sky ( _awareness prickled inside her. She knew him! She_ did _! But from_ where?) – went wide with disbelief. He looked at her from the tip of her strappy sandals to the tip of her blonde hair - and blinked.

Oh, how she liked it. She loved to shock, after all, though she’d been told that made her manner rude.

“I surprise you?” she asked him, mouth curling up in a lopsided smile.

“You’re not… what I expected.” He said lamely, even as his frown at her deepened.

She might have had something funny to say to that, something cutting too perhaps, but his nature intrigued her and distracted her from it. It was just so curious, and she could not resist any mystery. That had ever been her weakness.

He was not mortal. But he was not _other_ , either. Trapped he was, between the two. So strange.

“I disappoint you then?”

“I don’t know.”

The Queen took a step forward, willed her white flowery dress to shift consistence, lengthen. To become a hooded cape of smoke and ash, covering her from the top of her head to the tips of her fingers and toes and fluttering like fog behind her. Every star in the sky shone in its otherworldly fabric as she pushed her aura hard against them both, maybe a little more than necessary, because they _had_ ruined her morning.

Laurel grunted and braced her feet. The arched stumbled back a few steps and reached back for one of his arrows.

“Is _this_ more to your liking?” she asked, her voice deepening through and space, resounding against the frail walls of the loft with the echoes of a countless souls.

The windows shook and the walls vibrated, unable to contain even her smoothest whisper.

He stared, eyes wide. Did not speak.

The Queen let that particular form of hers go and returned to her flowy sundress and heels, folding the threads of her being back onto itself again. She had no shattered a single window in a week and she was not eager to break her lucky streak now.

The archer’s mouth had opened and closed a couple of times and though his hands were limp at his sides, he was fidgeting.

Laurel sighed.

“Oliver, meet Hades Aidoneus Chthonios. Plouton[1], Eubuleus[2], Polydegmon[3]. Goddess of the Dead and ruler of the Other Side.” Laurel introduced flatly, and at that point, unnecessarily.

Felicity raised one eyebrow at her. “You give me my true name and still call me a ‘goddess’. I know you don’t like my kind much, but there’s no need to get cheeky.” Her eyes hardened. “Especially since you’re here to ask for something.”

“My apologies.”

“Save them for when you mean them.” The Queen cautioned.

The nymph clenched her jaw. “I shall.”

“So here you are, and here I am. Ask me.”

It was almost a challenge. The living had come to her before, begging to be let into her realm, so they could carry something out. Sometimes she had let them, most times she had not. The rules of her realm were clear and thought they could be bent, it never lasted, and it never changed the will of the Fates. Not for anyone. Not even for her own self, as she had learned to her sorrow. Death may bend to some – as Nyssa had proved by not dashing Laurel’s hopes immediately, as she could have. Sometimes Nyssa had even allowed a trick or two to slip past her. But the ruler of the Underworld held the balance. She could not afford mistakes and she was not fond of exceptions.

Not even for one stray little nymph, no matter how bright her nature or how fierce her cry.

“I come to beg entrance to the realm of the dead, my Queen.” Laurel said clearly.

“And that is all?”

“That is all.”

She didn’t need a mirror to know the smile on her face was unkind. Her anger always had been. “You want to steal from me, Nereid? You think yourself _that_ clever?”

Laure’s eyes burned, the loss-fueled rage that had carried her to this moment still fresh. “I am no thief.”

“No? Then you must mean to die. For that you don’t need my permission, so you must be asking me to kill you. Which is an exercise in futility, since you know better than anyone that your string is not at an end, Nereid. Not yet. Not for a _long_ time.”

Laurel flinched. She knew her fate - it was close to cruel to remind her. Yet here she was.

Her nature was as predictable as it was chaotic.

The queen sighed and then sat down on one of the plush sofas of her mortal home.

“Do you know why it was Nyssa who came for your beloved, Laurel, and not her more bloodthirsty sisters?”

Pain was in every line of that drawn face, it flooded her eyes and leaked out of her with every shallow breath.

Still, the Nereid answered. “Tommy died in peace.”

The archer’s eyes were wide and shiny. He did not believe it. “Tommy died in pain.” He gritted between tightly clenched teeth, angry still and glaring at Nyssa as if the fault was hers.

For someone who was not quite human, he had an utterly mortal understanding of death, Felicity noted.

“Yes. And yet, he was not alone. Nor unloved.” Nyssa said slowly, speaking for the first time since the other two got there. “Nor did he die in vain.”

“Yes he did.” And this time, Laurel’s refusal was as total as she was about everything else.   

The Queen waved the words away. “No matter the manner of his death, I will not have it undone. Not for you nor for thundering Zeus himself and that is final.” Felicity declared.

But then after a breath, she softened her voice, her eyes. Tried to call understanding forth from the grieving nymph. “Do you really want to keep him from whatever peace he may find in the realm, in a vain battle to assuage your guilt, Nereid?”

The nymph shook her head. “No. I don’t want to keep Tommy from finding rest. I want to find it for the both of us.”

 “You have tried this before. Twice.” The Queen reminded her sternly. “You failed. Twice.”

Laurel’s shoulders slumped, the fight left, and it left her hollow and sad. “I’m not going to fight anymore. I’m going to end it.”

The Queen’s suspicion finally slid in place as smoothly as if it had been hovering just out of her reach all along. “You asked for permission to enter my realm.”

“Yes.”

“But you want to move beyond it.”

Laurel was calm. She was sure. “Yes.”

The queen looked hard at this creature that had survived eons and wars, the rise and fall of Olympus and outlived most of those who had hated her for daring to do what none had before her: challenge the Fates. And there she stood, ready to do it again.

She walked to the nymph, stood right in front of her so close that she could reach and take her hands in both her own. Laurel was taller than her, in this form. Lean and strong, still built more for the water than dry land.

“Do you remember how it happened, Nereid?” the Queen asked softly. “How this started? It’s been so long, but you must remember.”

She _had_ to remember. She had to understand or she would never be free.

But none could _make_ her understand, and after so long, she apparently had not learned.

“I remember I kissed someone, loved him and killed him in the same breath.” Laurel said, as a single tear escaped and fell down her cheek.

Yes, indeed. That is how it had happened. She had been so young, such a lovely soul, awed at all things living. She hadn’t even known what Death was, what fate entailed or its makers. How could she have known what it meant to undo it?

“And brought him to life.” the Queen reminded her. “It was his fate to die that day, but you didn’t let him. His thread had been woven, measured and cut, but you brought him back.”

She had tied the thread of his mortal life back together with part of her own without even realizing what she was doing. And in doing what was forbidden, she had bound him to her forever.

“Aides, please. His soul is more frayed every time I see him. I cannot watch him come undone in front of me.” Her determination colored her words. “I _will_ not.”

She courted the impossible, as always. Without understanding that she would only make things worse.

“The Kingdom of the Moira is kingdom of the limit and the end, Laurel. What is done cannot be undone there.”

The Queen knew this all too well. She had tried herself.

“No. But it can be unmade.” Laure looked up, all water, about to leak to the ground at the slightest touch. “You say it yourself all the time. None of us is really immortal. All of us are at the Moiras hands.”

Laurel tilted her chin up, stubborn, Determined. “I will give them my soul and let it be unmade. I will end, so that he may be free. I did this; _I_ am going to undo it.”

_No, you will only bring more ruin on yourself… and I am a fool for letting you._

Living around shades had made her more human than she ought to be, the Queen thought absently.

But then again she knew it was not so. She knew her reasons and they ran deep, of a hurt that nothing could ever assuage. Loss that still pulsed alive and fresh, from a wound always wet that would never heal, even after eons.

“You never meant to save him.” The archer whispered.

The Queen had almost forgotten about him. But now that she saw him, she did pity him. Understanding dawned on him like a fresh layer of misery, and he swayed on his feet at its weight.

Laurel looked at him, and the sadness in her eyes spanned millennia. “No. I have tried every way to save him. There are none.”

“You lied to me.” Though he couldn’t seem to decide if he was angry or desperate because of it.

His mouth twisted with the former but his eyes swam in the latter.

“I didn’t. I said-”

“ _You said you would fight to free him_!” he yelled, and his anger pushed at the Queen and the Nereid both, as if the brighter his anger, the hotter it burned outwards.

“And I will.” Laurel said calmly.

He shook his head, started pacing up and down, every stop leaving some of his blood behind on her floor. His suit was so dark Felicity hadn’t been able to tell, but he _was_ bleeding.

“You don’t want to bring him back, you want to…”

“I want to release him.” Laurel said simply.

Everything about her juxtaposed everything in him, and he looked at them both as if he was the storm and they were the shore he couldn’t wait to hit.

The Queen couldn’t remember, from the top of her head, the last time someone from the upper world had looked at her without dread.

“Your friend has passed, Archer. Death cannot be reversed.”

“You are the _goddess_ of death. You can do whatever you want!” he hurled the words at her in anger, an accusation, but the next moment he was closer than anyone had dared to come without invitation.

Close enough that for a moment Nyssa stepped forward, her form flickering between the dark-haired maiden and the skeleton mortals saw when she came from them, before remembering there was nothing the Archer could do – his nature close to mortal than deathless – that would ever impact the Queen.

His humanity showed in his eyes, rimmed-red and still shiny with tears, pleading. Nothing of her kind, the queen thought, would ever dare be so open-souled and honest.

“I will give anything.” He whispered fiercely. “ _Everything_. Please…”

The Queen stood there, having to look up to catch his eyes in this form.

“I am sorry, Archer.” And she was surprised to mean it. “But I cannot give back what has been lost to you. It is out of my hands. All I can do is care for your friend’s soul, until he returns again.”

His face contorted in anger and he turned away from her, hands going to his face, heels of his palms pressing against his eyes.

It was such a familiar gesture that for a moment the Queen was not a queen, she was herself, and she was rendered breathless.

“Oliver.” Laurel reached for him, but he passed her by without stopping. He stalked out of the room in big strides, taking with him the stifling press of grief. For a moment Laurel looked like she wanted to go after him, but it passed.

She turned her eyes on Felicity instead. “Will you let me pass, my Queen?”

Felicity sighed. Never had a amore stubborn creature lived than this sea-born nymph. “Nereid… Laurel, why do you think you were punished?”

Laurel frowned, her impatience making her shift her weight from foot to foot, but she answered. “His life was not mine to take. Or give.”

“Yes. And because you are _relentless_.” The Queen reminded her. “The kind of thinking that has driven you to this moment, right here and now, was the same one that drove you to your fate.”

She stepped closer to Laurel and looked deep into those changeable eyes, as grey as a storm one moment, as clear as the sea in the shallows the next, and wished she could will the nymph to understand.

“Until you learn, it will never stop. Your beloved will walk the underworld without peace, let go of his memories and live again, only as long as he did that first time you killed him, and die, over and over again. You must _relent_ , Laurel.”

But the smile on the other woman’s lips was not one of understanding. It was one of surrender.

“I cannot.” She glanced at Nyssa, and then back at the queen. “None of us can. Creatures like us don’t… bend, we don’t learn. We may not be immortal, but we just _are_ , like rocks.”

“That is no true, my friend.”

Laurel’s smile contained a sadness that spanned eaons. Two full tears fell down her cheeks, cutting a path through the blood and grime on her skin. “You are a Chonian. Perhaps this, as all else, is different for you. But I am a creature of the living world, daughter of the sea and blood of the Olympians. You better than anyone know their unchangeable nature.

“So you see, my Queen, I can no more learn to be different from what I am, than the sun can learn to shine in the underworld… and I think you know that _that_ is the true measure of my punishment.”

The Queen stepped closer, took Laurel’s face in both her hands and made her lean in, touching their foreheads together.

Because so it was, and if the Nereid could see the truth of her own self, then she understood the ways around her curse better than the Queen had given her credit for. Better, even, than the Nereid gave herself credit for.

Perhaps she had a chance after all.

“Very well. So be it.” The Queen said softly as she leaned in, placing a kiss on the other woman’s lips, as light as the touch of a flower’s petal.

In her mind, she opened the way for Laurel’s living soul to cross over to the other side, where no living belonged. And it was so that the Nereid slipped through her fingers with a whisper, leaving nothing of herself behind but for the smell of the destruction that had brought her here.

The Queen sighed, her shoulders falling.

“May the light of the creators protect you.” she murmured, eyes still closed, brushing the tips of her fingers together.

“This is the second time you have sided against the Fates, Aides.” Nyssa reminded her. “I am… concerned.”

She turned to where Nyssa was still standing, motionless as only she could be.

“Why? Don’t you remember what they teach us: anything that must happen, shall happen, and it cannot happen any other way.” The Queen said  with a hint of mischief. “Even when it works against the will of the Fates. They are not the highest manifestation of destiny.”

She looked down to the sprawling city beneath her, busting with life.

“Sometimes I think there is no destiny. That there is only what is written in our bodies and our will to guide us.”

“Your thoughts never did you any favors.” Nyssa scoffed.

That too made the Queen smile. “No, I suppose not.”

-

That night, she fell asleep in her own bed, in her own realm. She laid her head on her pillow and was so tired that she hardly felt Hypnos’ kiss on her forehead. She was there one moment and gone the next, to the realm of dreams, where everything was smoke and visions.

Someone of her nature knew how to walk these stranger lands better than most, but Morpheus was not one to be controlled and he made his realm as changeable as he was himself.

The Queen was not surprised though, when she was visited that night by the same promise that had come to her so many times before.

He was always faceless, sometimes even shapeless, but he always embraced her as a lover. And in her dreams, she went to him easily. No reserve or doubts, because in the land between sleep and awakening, his soul was as familiar to her as her own, more memory than dream, but not real enough to hurt.

The warmth of him was what she felt first, always. He felt real even in a land as ephemeral as this, because even here he was warm.

When his arms came around her, she was happy to know that this time, he would not be formless.

He was tall. When she tilted her head up, her lips brushed his chin, and it made her smile. This time too, when he leaned down to kiss her, it felt as if she had been made for that moment. She tilted her head and deepened their kiss, letting go of past and memories and existing just for his lips on her and how they made her feel.

He’d been her companion for so long that he felt familiar now, her mind so attuned to this particular creation, that he even felt like he was not born from her. Like he was his own being, here at his own will. But she still kissed him as if none of that mattered.

And it didn’t. She was always wary of admitting it when she woke, how easily she believed her own deception in these dreams… but she did.

In her dreams, he felt real. And the way she arched into his hands as if she couldn’t bear to be without them when they traveled up her back, up her spine, to her face - that was real too. She felt his warmth, his weight, pressing her against her own bed. The heat of him between her legs felt real and it made her _need_ … need that was alive and made her thighs shake, sparks of an incoming storm tightening low in her belly, liquefying lower. She ran her hands up his hack, felt his skin - smooth and not, in patches - as if he’d lived as long as she’d lived of a life of his own. As if he had history. The shape of him…

He kissed a devastating path down her neck and stayed there, kissing behind her ear and in that soft place just beneath it, until she flipped him to his back and pressed them together, bare to each other, holding him still with her thighs.

And he wrapped his arms around her then, and held her so tight… She could feel him, pressed against her belly, and if she moved just right-

But his kisses kept distracting her. His mouth opened to hers, inviting her in to taste him deep, slow, the way she wanted to have him, feel him. She was aching for it with such sweet need she thought she would go mad for the want of it.

The room spun and so did she, her back against the bed again. This game between them went always like this, it made her smile against his lips.

She could feel it, her existence tilting on its axis just as she opened her eyes, so close to his face they were nose to nose… and met blue. Blue as crystal, as limpid as the sky.

Blue as spring.

Felicity jerked back so harshly that she might have woken, at any other time. But she did not…

Her heart was drumming against her ribs, relentless, her eyes unable to leave his face, his body relaxed on her bed, as if his home was right there between her bed and the cradle of her thighs.

His smile…

_No…_

This was no ordinary dream. I could not be. It did not answer to her at all, though she had not noticed until she’d tried to grasp at it. _He_ did not answer to her. He just took her face gently in his hands, thumbs brushing her cheekbones, his smile so soft, and she… she was overwhelmed, her chest tightening with it.

She didn’t know anymore if he was her dream - or of she was his.

‘ _You_ _know how to find me._ ’ He said, voice soft, eyes softer. Familiar… ‘ _You know what you have to do._ ’

‘ _You are lost to me, my love. You have been for a long time. Why torment me like this?_ ’

But she knew he was not to blame. It was her own mind that sometimes turned on her.

‘ _I’m not. I’m here. I’m waiting for you. I’ve been waiting for so long, my love.’_

She startled, looked at him a long time, searching for his face through the mist of her dream, trying to push it away to see him again. To understand what this vision was.

It felt like truth.

She leaned into him, touched the tips of her fingers to his cheek, amazed and afraid. She breathed in, it caught on the way out. She was shaking and she only realized it when she saw her trembling fingers reach up to wrap around one of his wrists tightly.

This was no ordinary dream and - he never had been.

‘ _Where are you?_ _Right now, where are you? I will come to you, tell me. Tell me._ ’

He smiled. Oh, it was so sweet.

‘ _Find me, Aristi **[4]**._ ’ And his smile widened then, his eyes shone with amusement and pride. _‘If you wear the name_ _Hades Aidoneus as well as you claim, you will_ _find me._ ’

She startled awake so violently that the vases in the room shattered with the riptide of her emotions, and the mirror cracked too, before she could reign herself in. She was covered in sweat, her sheets wrapped around her legs, uncomfortably wet and so unsatisfied she was still shaking, her skin tingling with awareness of him… everywhere.

She bit her lip and she could swear, she could almost taste him.

But how…

It _couldn’t_ be. She’d always thought… She’d thought she’d dreamed him up, because she was lonely and because she was sad, and because he was never more than a shade in a dream.

It _couldn’t_ be real!

But then she remembered. Those eyes and that strange nature, neither here nor there.

_What are you?_

Felicity fell back on the bed with a barely contained scream. But it only kept building, so she stopped bothering and let it out.

“ _Fuck_!”

 

[1] Giver of Wealth

[2] Giver of good council

[3] Reciever of many

[4] Best/Purest


	2. Chapter 2

 

> ( _Persephone leans onto Hades and kisses him_ )   
>  **_she whispers_** : for love, i will handle your sins.
> 
>                                                        and for justice
> 
>         for justice i will show you mine.
> 
> — since our story is a crime itself | **[g.f.](https://hyperjon.tumblr.com/tagged/mine)**

Hecate had gone to the palace before being summoned, feeling she was needed, Her Queen’s distress pulling her out of her own rest. She followed now down the halls of the palace, watching as the Queen’s nightgown floated around her, rippling and transforming into long robes of deep crimson.

"Is it possible?"

Hecate shook her head, the beads of selenite woven in her russet-blonde hair clicking together. "Forgive me, My Queen. I have no answers."

Her ruler stopped and turned her dark eyes on her own. Though she seemed calm, Hecate saw the truth of the Queen’s feeling in the way her blue irises were rimmed in fire, a glowing orange ring that mirrored the flames of the Phlegethon and reflected the true nature of the Chthonian ruler.

And yet, as they both looked at one another, the ruler fell away and in her place Hecate saw the young girl she had met centuries ago, inexperienced and startled by all that lay before her, unsure of all, even her own heart.

"How could such a thing happen? _How_ could he…" the Queen stopped herself, biting her lip.

Hecate did not speak. It was not a question meant to be answered.

"I looked everywhere for him. _Everywhere_. There was no nook or groove in creation that I did not turn upside down, searching for his soul. And _now_ …"

Her eyes glowed brighter with her frustration and anger, the fire almost overtaking the blue, hands balling into fists.

"I shall speak with my mother, seek her wisdom." Hecate said plainly. Lady Nyx would either have answers, or show Hecate where to look for them.

The Queen nodded just as she closed her eyes and extended her arms forward. Hecate took her hand and gave her Queen free reign over the Ether, her domain. She would help, follow the lead after learning where it was she should look, for she did not yet know. She felt her Queen reaching out, feeling for that strange duality that had been so puzzling in rhe mortal she had met mere hours before.

She could not find him and the queens urgency grew, desperation sinking its teeth deeper into her.

"Morpheus.” The Queen breathed out. “Help me."

Her old friend's whisper was as incorporeal as he was.

“I am here, my queen.” He materialized, cloaked, one eye visible under the deep fold of his hood.

"Where is he?"

She felt the cool hands of the King of Dreams frame her face, his fingertips at her temples calming her, his reach stretching through her, showing her his own whispery world of shadows and fantasies.

An ancient temple nestled between snow-peaked mountains and surrounded by a blistering desert. A steep climb in the winter, Whiteness overwhelming the forest.

_Where is this place? Where have you been hidden from me?_

Hecate drew a sharp breath, her violent jerk backwards from the ether pulling the queen along as well.

“Hecate!”

But she met her Queen’s anger with resolute understanding. "The mountain." She said.

The Queen’s eyes grew round.

_No…_

"He was to make a deal with the Demon for his friend's life."

Hecate saw it plainly when the queens shock distilled into sharper fury.

She turned to the stables, her steps quick, her heart beating so loud that Hecate could hear his thumping. The floating dress molded itself to the Queen’s body and chanced texture as she strode outside, shifting into shiny plates of silver metal. A long black cloak unfurled from the collar of her armor, wrapping around her shoulders and floating behind her as she walked. She had not worn this plate of armor since the Tyrant’s attempt to leave his chains. 

The earth beneath their feet splintered just as they reached the inner garden of the castle. Smoke curled up from the chasm and a golden light shine through. The beating of hooves rumbled into a thundering sound as the four horses pulling Hade’s chariot burst into the surface. The Queen walked forward, stepping into the chariot and pulling the reigns.

“Aristi!” Hecate called at the last moment. “Cloak him and yourself when you are up above.”

The Queen’s frown demanded a quick explanation.

“You do not know who he is, nor are you sure if he is who you hope him to be. It is best not to risk his mortal life in vain, or your safety, by alerting others of his… existence.”

The Queen’s eyes burned with the implication of that, before she nodded and she snapped the reigns of the chariot.

-

He'd gotten down on his knees and begged. He hadn't been above it.

He wasn’t above anything anymore. There was nothing echoing over the guilt and the pain and the roaring of all 300 souls he'd failed. He would have begged for all of them, but he could only bring back the one.

That only one that mattered.

When he had sat down in front of the altar to pray, as was the League’s custom, before the duel, he had realized that he had no prayers, only a realization: he was his mother’s son. He could still hear her saying ‘ _they_ are not my children’.

The hundreds of people that died were not his best friend.

Maybe Hades had seen him for what he was and that was why she had refused him.

The demon hadn’t though.

But nothing came from nothing or _for_ nothing. He had to win, and then have his plea granted. Prove himself worthy, as the Demon said.

If it was about worth, Oliver was sure it was all in vain. He felt worthy of nothing.

But it was a challenge to the death and Oliver had just realized that he was only good at two things: killing and dying.

Of course he’d said yes.

He did not feel the sword, not really. He felt the sharp sting of the first cut, the suffocating burn of a lung that would not breathe. But was there pain? He couldn’t be sure, it was so quick. He heard Ra’s praying for him, but it was from a distance. He was far away, far _within_ , as life slipped between his fingers.

When the sword was pulled out of his lung agony singed into his soul, and the pain was so bright and total that his vision went white.

His mother, his father. Thea, Laurel.

 _Tommy_ …

He saw his life as he had lived it. It came to him in a cacophony of regret and violence and he saw himself - a failure at everything he had ever tried that had mattered: a son, a brother, a friend a lover. Even as a human being.

He’d thought he had nothing left to lose, because how could he ever make up for the damage he had caused? But as he felt Ra’s kick him in the chest and off the cliff, he realized Oliver realized he’d been wrong. The anger that that feeling provoked was so sharp that it brought tears to his eyes.

But it was too late. The emptiness pulled him down, cold air rushing by his ears. He was falling and he could do nothing to stop it. He was dying.

He did not see her come through the side of the mountain like a dark shadow; the four horses pulling her chariot riding so hard they split the stone in two. She caught him before the stones beneath them both did, arms wrapped around his bleeding torso and settled him at her feet as the movement of her golden chariot blew smoke and snow up around them.

Oliver felt himself fading away. He was sure he was dying when he stopped shivering, the cold feeling like a blanket. He felt soft hands on his face and thought death wasn’t so bad. After all, he’d never thought he’d get a gentle end so this was already more than he’d thought he would get. It felt fitting though, that after having this dream so many times it felt like a memory, she should be with him at the very end too.

-

He did not die.

He dreamed instead.

Oliver knew it was a dream and not death, because it was like every other dream about her he had had.

Sometimes they had been suffocating nightmares, of screaming and loss and blood. They were different from the other kinds of nightmares he had, because _she_ was there – unknown woman with blood-red hair, screaming at him to get out, to run. Crying with a grief that was so inconsolable and heavy it always woke him up in a cold sweat. Dreams that he had always thought were about the people he had left behind or disappointed… and always known that that wasn’t quite right, because other times, he dreamt himself in foreign little corners of peace that he had no idea how he'd managed to imagine.

He would wake up with her his own bed, or hers, something he knew for sure in his dream, and he would watch her get up and walk around a room he’d never seen, with high walls, archways and dark stone ceiling. Or they would lay there together and talk about things he never managed to remember once he woke up. She would touch his face, the tips of her fingers skimming down his forehead, his cheek and his neck, settling over his heart. She'd kiss him and smile against his lips and there were times when he’d felt like a failure before the island when the purest happiness he'd ever felt was to be found in dreams.

He’d thought it was pathetic, but after the island it had turned into a kind comfort. After he woke up, he would convince himself that it was Laurel he’d been dreaming, or Shado, and that his mind was a strange place. He dreamt about the both of them and Sara too often enough that it was almost believable.

But she was none of the women he knew and never would be anyone he would know. She just was, and sometimes Oliver thought he was building himself a fantasy where he was loved and he had everything he wanted, and it didn’t even matter with who.

He was that kind of asshole, at least there was some continuity there.

But then he woke up gasping after dreaming of falling, and after taking a moment to realize that everything hurt including breathing, he realized he was in a small room, that there was a fire lighting it and little else… and there was someone in there with him.

He’d never seen her face in his dreams but he knew the moment he saw her there that she had been who he had been dreaming about. And for a long moment, that took all words and thought from him.

Then of course he started doubting whether he was really awake or not, though the breathtaking pain he felt really left no doubt of the sharp nature of his reality.

“What-”

The back of her cool fingers pressed against his forehead, before she put her hand on his shoulder and pushed him gently back.

“You need rest.”

He couldn’t breathe, and as his heart started beating faster, it became harder to keep his eyes open.

Maybe he really had died, he thought as he took one last look through his heavy lids, at her and her blonde hair curling around her face, framed by the glow of the fire behind her. The bright flower prints on her black coat started melting together as darkness took him again.

\-                                                          

She watched over him as he slept in this small lair that she had made to keep them both from the harsh wind of the mountains.  

She'd thought he would die. Surely, Thanatos would come to collect him at any moment, after he suffered a sword through the chest. Nothing she could have done would have stopped it, and for a moment, as she stood over him, trying to stop his bleeding with what skill she had learned from Nyx, the moment at melted into another one, eons ago. There had been another man in her arms, gasping his last breaths, eyes unseeing as she held him, all but helpless.

But it had only been a moment. She was not the same creature she’d been then, and neither was the man in her arms.

And this one had not died.

She had washed his wounds with waters of the beyond, given him nectar and ambrosia to keep him from weakening further, but it was his own heart that was stubborn enough to beat past the flutter of Thanatos’ wings.

She got up and paced the confining length of the hut.

There was lingering anger from his stupidity that threaded up her spine every time she thought how close to death he'd really come. She had told him, openly and in great honestly, that there was nothing to be done for his friend. Nothing. If there had been a way she would have shown it to him. As she did show it to the nymph. But he had not believed her.

Love was a strange thing in the hearts of any who bore it, she thought quietly, leaving her anger behind as she turned to look at his face again. Her eyes slid lower, to his battered body, and the seeping wound beneath his fifth rib. He was battle worn - all the tales of what he had been through and the ways he'd been hurt, written over his body, indelible. She wished for one of Hecate's selenite beads now, to be able to look into it and see his whole story, from when he was born to this moment right now. Who he was.

He was handsome. And tired. She saw that looking beyond his flesh and into what lay beneath. She reached out and laud a hand on his shoulder, reaching with her power. She needed to be sure.

It was within the depths of that soul that she found the truth of what she had first doubted. Her knees shook so she walked forward and sat there, just by the side of the makeshift bed he was laying on. Her heart was drumming so fast against her breastbone she was sure it could be heard all the way down to Chthonia.

It was him. It _truly_ was. There was no mistaking it.

She remembered everything about him – how could she possibly mistake him? She cursed herself now for not seeing him sooner, but standing in that room he had been so clouded over by pain that she had not see… but she did see now.

After all the time she’d spent looking for him, _mourning_ him… he was right there.

And he did not know her nor did he know himself.

She felt tears fall down her cheeks, as sorrow opened up her heart and gnawed at it.

_Who hid you from me? Why so long? How could your splendid soul have passed through my kingdom without me recognizing you?_

_How many ways have I failed you, my love?_

He took a sharp breath and then groaned at the feel of air stretching his lungs. She wiped the tears away from her face hastily and got up, walking over to her seat beside the fire.

His eyes found her almost as soon as they opened, as if he'd known where to look.

" _You_ …" his voice broke around the word.

"Yes, me."

She walked over to him and held out her own cup, the ambrosia within shining golden, he just stared at the wooden thing as if it was something he’d never learned the use of.

"Am I dead?" he asked instead.

She smiled. "Hardly. You'd know it if you were dead, and I would welcome you to a different place."

His fingers brushed over the tight bandages over his ribs and he winced, falling backwards and breathing raggedly.

"I _should_ be dead."

"Yes you should be. But I suppose you weren't as ready for it as you thought."

He braced his hands on the rough bedding and tried to sit up again.

"You should not do that."

His eyes flickered back to hers and again, he seemed caught between limb-freezing fear and resignation.

He did not listen, and chose to sit up instead, his eyes never moving from hers. The he looked down, eyes unseeing. He was probably remembering the wound he suffered.

"Did…" he gulped, looked around trying to find the words he needed in the bare walls of the small hut.”Did you save me?"

"I doubt that I could have. Despite what you seem to think, I am not all-powerful. You simply survived.”

He had, hadn’t he? It was almost starting to feel like punishment, the way he survived while everyone that mattered to him didn’t. he had made it through again, but he hadn’t managed to do what he’d come here to do. His eyes fixed on the ceiling, grief threading through the pain and then falling down a dark pit of numbness opening inside him.

"I lost."

"Yes. As it was natural that you would. As you knew that you would." She added tonelessly.

His eyes were quick to find hers. "I didn't come here to die."

Her smile was slow, without any hint of mirth, her eyes unflinching. Her voice was low and serious when she spoke.

"I think it would be best if you do not try to lie to me, Oliver Queen. It’s an exercise in futility and it would save us both time."

He hadn’t forgotten who – _what_ – she was, but as she looked at him as if she knew him and every secret he’s ever had, Oliver felt a shiver crawl up his spine. He was suddenly very aware of how vulnerable he was, hurting and wounded without any kind of way to protect himself, from her seemingly all-knowing eyes nor anything else.

Then it occurred to him that he shouldn’t care. But he did. He never liked being at these kinds of disadvantages.

"I didn't come here to die." He repeated, surer of his words now.  

"How do you expect me to believe something you cannot make yourself believe?"

Oliver looked away, irritated. "Why are you here? What do you want?”

She cocked one eyebrow at him. “Existentially, or just in general? Because let me tell you, I have been craving some ice-cream since the moment I got here.”

His mouth fell a little open, whether from confusion or pain she did not know.

“From me.” He added roughly, wincing.

She shrugged, pursing her lips.

“Why, nothing at all.” Which was not a lie, exactly. It wasn’t about want. It was about need. “I was just passing through - the mountain air is really good for my skin – before snatching you from a plunge to your sure death, and bringing you here, to fight with a slightly less sure death. Though you seem determined to undo all my good work.”

He looked at her like she made even less sense to him now, before glancing at his bandages, to where his blood had stained them.

His eyes were almost unseeing when he glanced at her again.

“Why?”

She should have taken offense at his incessant questions and the fact that he thought he could question her, but the truth was she could see nothing beyond the truth of who he was. Who he truly was inhabiting that frail mortal body.

She felt like she owed that man ever answer she could give.

So she did.

"You told me to find you.” She said softly, openly. “So I did."

He didn’t understand at first, frowned. And then she saw comprehension dawn on him like a curtain being pulled back from his eyes. His first reaction was denial.

“What?”

“I dreamt about you and you told me to find you.” She repeated. Calm. Sure. Watchful of his reaction. Of how his heart was starting to beat faster and his breathing couldn’t keep up without hurting him. A thin layer of sweat appeared on his forehead.

_No…_

“Yes.” She confirmed.

"That was you? In…"

 _In my dreams_ , he meant to say, though the words got stuck in his throat.

It didn’t matter, she understood just from the look on his face. She’d suspected at first, but now she was certain: She had been in his dreams as much as he had been in hers.

"Was it?" he pressed, his voice hoarse.

"You tell me. It was your dream as much as it was mine."

He thought about it. Looked at her up and down inch by inch. She felt her breath leave her lungs as he did.

It was all so familiar but so different at the same time. She didn’t know what to think of it. How to understand all these happenings. She couldn’t see what lay beyond them.

And she wasn’t that interested, at the moment.

"It was you.” He said through numb lips, his mind firing at all cylinders, trying to keep up with this strange reality that made less sense than any dream. _How_ was it possible? _Why_?

He didn’t even…

“Do I call you Hades? I don’t… I don’t remember the other names Laurel called you."

"Hades Aidoneus.” She told him in a whisper, her throat tightening around the words. She cleared her throat. “The other words Laurel spoke are titles. But my real name has hardly ever been spoken freely up here.”

One corner of his mouth ticked upwards. He felt a little bit out of his body, but he couldn’t seem to find a way to make everything make simple sense again. “Right. People were too afraid of you to say your name.”

She grinned and felt something in her chest loosening as the breathless tension between them shifted into something less restraining.

“Something like that, yes. You may call me Felicity, for now. It’s the name I have chosen for myself."

“You get to chose?”

The question gave her the opening she was hoping for.

“Names make little difference when what they encompass remain the same.”

He huffed; something that she imagined was a strained kind of amusement. “Who knew the Iliad and the Odyssey would come in handy one day."    

She laughed, truly this time. "Well, Homer did get many things very right. And other not so right, but then again the poem is wonderful."

"He didn’t have many things to say about you."

She shrugged. "I do not like involving myself in the conflicts of the world above. They all come to me in the end, one way or another.”

Oliver shivered.

He was talking to Hades. _Right_.

She stood and walked over to him, took the cup she offered with great care, so that their hands did not touch. He drank from it hesitantly, before coughing.

“What is this?”

“Something that will help you heal.”

He was suspicious – she could see it in the narrowing of his eyes. His eyes, so strangely, the only unchanged thing about him.

"Is it going to kill me?"

She scrunched up her nose. "Stop assuming I’m going to kill you. It's rude."

"You’re the goddess of the dead." He pointed out, and the look she gave him was almost offended.

"Not a goddess. And certainly not of the dead. And I have never understood why mortals call Chthonia the realm of the _dead_ , of all things."

"Isn't it?"

She rolled her eyes, a gesture so human that it was difficult to remember for a moment she was not one.

"Where do you think life comes from, Oliver?"

He gulped. “I haven’t really thought that much about it.”

She sat down on the stool closer to his bed. “Now is not the time for a theology and metaphysics debate anyway. Some other time I will tell you about the secrets of my world.”

He gulped but didn’t say anything and for a moment she wanted to just reach forward and into his thought, lay him bare to her.

But she couldn’t. she already knew so much more than she did. She did not want to start their relationship by unbalancing it even further.

“You will need help changing those.” She nodded at his bandages.

He touched them as if he’d forgotten about them, in his haste to catalogue everything about her.

“Do you know why…”

Why he walked his dreams and she his? She did know, and debated telling him, but she was afraid. For the first time in so long, fear had finally found her.

“I am  not yet sure.”

There it was. Technically not a lie.

She reached forward with her right hand, twirled her fingers and reached into the ether, pulling from its depths the bandages she would need. Her subtle demonstration of power set his teeth on edge, but he had yet to blink as he watched her and she didn’t know if it was because he thought she would disappear, or because he was afraid she would snatch his soul the moment he did.

She walked behind him, knelt on the bedding and undid the bandages carefully. Her fingertips brushed his skin as she did, and then again when she applied the paste of crushed roots and herbs to his wound, holding it out to him so that he could apply it on the wound on his torso. And as she wrapped the bandages around his torso again, she remembered his smiled. How he used to stare at her as if she was the most fearsome creature he'd ever seen. Touch her as if she was thin glass, but kiss her as if she was stronger than the foundations of the earth.

She remembered, and she wanted to drag Oliver Queen down into the Underworld and have him drink from the waters of the Mnemosyne pool, so that he could remember too.

"Where is your Persephone?" he asked then, feeling brave enough for that question only once she wasn’t looking straight at him.

He didn’t think she’d answer but she did.

"Not with me anymore." She said quietly.

“What happened?”

It took her a long time to answer that.

“He died.”

The words were spoken calmly, but there was something in her voice that betrayed a thousand layers of emotion. Oliver tried to turn around, but the stab of pain through his middle stopped him.

“Stay still.” She ordered.

"Gods can die?"

She tied the end of bandages in a knot and stood. "There is nothing under creation that is truly deathless. One day the sun will die too, Gaia with it, and all of the Cosmos will return to the Chaos that birthed it. Everything can die.”

The fire hissed as one of the logs burned through and cracked, its sparks flying up before settling again.

"I'm sorry for your loss."

She sighed deeply and leaned against the cold wall of the hut. “As I am for yours."

He strayed silent, but she knew what he wanted, so she gave it to him.

“He is at peace for now.” She said. “He walks the fields of Asphotel, and soon he will drink from the Lethe, leave his memories behind and be reborn, as someone new.”

He looked down, probably trying to hide his feelings from her.

“Laurel…”

“If she succeeds, then this will be the last time your friend will have to come back to life against his will.”

“If?”

She shrugged. “It depends on her.”

“You said it was impossible. That nothing could change what was supposed to happen.”

Her smile was small and full of secrets. “Nothing is impossible. Anything that has been done can be undone, if one is willing to pay the price.”

He narrowed his eyes on her then.

_Come on. Ask me._

“I think you lied to me before.” He said finally. His eyes were just as sure on hers as if he truly thought himself her equal. “I think you know why you were in my dreams and don’t want to tell me.”

“We used to know each other, you and I. A long time ago. We were friends.”

Oliver let out a long breath, his shoulders sagged. “You mean…”

“In your previous life, yes.”

“Right. Previous life.”  He nodded mechanically and she could see that he did not believe her, couldn’t even begin to wrap his head around the idea of it. “I don’t believe in reincarnation.”

“You belief is not a requirement for it.”

Oliver passed a hand though his hair, winced when his fingers pressed on a tender bruise at the side of his face.

“So what makes me different?” He asked then. “I remember falling. I thought I was dreaming but I know _you_ caught me.”

He sounded so sure, but he still waited for her to confirm it. In truth, he was probably not even sure of his own skin at this point. She longed to soothe him, but she doubted he would welcome her now.

“I said I did.”

“Why?”

She could hear the question he didn’t dare ask yet. _What makes me so special that you should still be here?_

“You’ve survived fire and iron, gunshot wounds to the chest and now a sword through your lung. Tell me – do you still really think you are the same as all other men and women you have met?”

His blood drained from his face, leaving him bone-white. For a moment she thought he would pass out on her and bit her lip, regretting her haste.

“No, that’s not possible.”

“And why not?”

“I…” but he did not have words.

She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. “There is something curious about you and I have a curious nature. That is all. I couldn’t very well let you die without knowing what it was, now, could I?”

He didn’t seem that convinced. “I think you’re lying to me again. You said we should agree not to lie to each other.”

She smiled at him widely. “We did. But I promise you, I’m not lying.”

“But you’re not telling me the whole truth either.”

“No. Because I don’t know the whole truth yet. But when I learn it, I will share it with you. I promise.”

“I wouldn’t know if you broke that promise.”

She straightened her spine. “I swear it on the Styx, Oliver Queen. I will be honest with you.”

_Just not yet._


End file.
